“Boris, is it?”
The captor grinned farther. “Good job, although I call cheating. You didn’t bother to check in on the promising new recruits, did you?”
Caleb shrugged. “It’s called delegation, and I’m sorry if you felt slighted.” He had to lead Boris on a bit until he could gain the measure of his situation. Clearly the man was a plant, an enemy infiltrating their very center. Something no one had foreseen. The question was why not?
He would attempt to find that answer while diverting the questions and gauging the scope of the damage done. Squinting, looking over Boris’s shoulder to the TV, he reasserted that on that score at least, the damage was near total.
Boris followed his attention, then nodded after reaching for the dial. Switched it off. “Enough of that. You get the gist.” He leaned back, closer to Caleb so their eyes were almost a foot apart.
“Why?” Caleb whispered. “You’re like us, I can tell that much. You’ve just doomed yourself along with the rest of us. Can’t all be because you didn’t score high enough on—”
“Screw your initiation tests, Mr. Crowe.” Boris sat back, crossing his legs. “And I’m surprised you’re not offering me your thanks. Stargate and the Crowe family…” He shook his head sadly. “Not quite a match made in heaven. Bad history together, wouldn’t you agree?”
Caleb said nothing, wincing inwardly at the thought of what his father had suffered at the hands of those operatives, when he had refused to share his visions.
“You know Stargate had to be exposed and shut down for good. I finished what you began years ago, but I do thank you. We thank you.”
“What for?” And who’s ‘we’?
“Why, the obvious. Bringing all of the best and most promising psychics together. Maintaining files on so many more. Tagging them all for us so all those we didn’t catch in the raid, well…we’re getting to them now. If they haven’t already been caught, they will be.” He smirked. “Nowhere to hide, old sport.”
Caleb glared at him. “Don’t Gatsby me, asshole. Who are you working for? Tell me and make it easy, or I just blink my eyes and find out the fun way.”
“Ah yes. Scry all you like. Maybe you’ll see them. Maybe…”
Caleb took a deep breath, about to calm his nerves and give it a try.
“Maybe I will save you the trouble. Sure, you might see an underground city. A lake in the gloom. A far off snow-capped mountain range, or maybe even a more exotic…dare I say…extra-worldly location?”
“What do you know?”
Boris scratched his chin, tilting back in his chair. He gazed longingly at the ceiling. “You might see robed figures, a few of them. You might get a vibe of great sense of age, of ancient rituals and staggering power. Hell, maybe even get a glimpse of some hidden Nazi base, still operating in some remote area.”
Caleb’s skin broke out in a fresh chill. Air circulating from somewhere, colder than it needed to be. “Would I see all of that? Would I see them?” He licked his lips, deciding to try something else. “Or would I see where you have me? This place. A famous rock formation, all of red basalt, centered between Mount Connor and the Devil’s Marbles on an east-west geographical line?”
The sound of chair legs slamming back down brought a smile to his face.
Got you on that, Caleb thought. “You’ve brought me all the way around the world. We’re in Australia.”
Boris’s smile returned after a hesitation. “Very good, Crowe. But do you know why you saw what you saw?”
“I’m sure I’ll figure it out.” That and the atom bomb test, and the powerful lines forming that grid…
“No, you won’t.”
“And why is that?”
“Because for all your power, your assembled team of so-called talented seers, you still don’t get it.”
“Get what?”
Boris leaned in, filling Caleb’s vision with his face, the features twisting into a grim look of superiority. “Me.”
“What do you…?”
A flash and he was back on top of the famous landmark of Ayers Rock in the Australian outback. The staff dissolves in his grasp. His bare feet are suddenly covered with wing tips and he’s wearing the clothes he just had on before his abduction from Stargate. No longer some nameless aboriginal explorer.
He stands on the rock, teetering, shaking as the entire world, all he can see, trembles. Clouds from the distant mushroom blast roll overhead and then expel a blast of white-hot energy, a churning furnace of gas and radiation, and with it comes a stinging but cooling blizzard of ice and thick snow, swirling and covering the world in white.
Another figure emerges from the swirling blizzard.
A man dressed all in black, impervious to the cold, to the radiation and the elements. He calmly steps out of the air as if deposited from a rip in the fabric of reality.
“Now you ‘see’, Mr. Crowe.” Boris raises his arms, and the next words reverberate from the vision and from real life.
“You see only what I want you to see.”
Caleb’s dream skin is peeled away. His lips, first scorched, then frozen, crack as his bones emerge from tattered clothes now aged by the centuries and turning to dust.
Boris steps in close.
“You can trust nothing you see. Never again. None of you…”
He raises his hand, snaps his fingers and Caleb watches from above as his skeletal body shatters into fragments, then to a fine powder scattered into the laughing winds and he—
Gasps back into reality…
And to an empty room. Boris’s chair is tipped over, and Caleb is once again alone.
Only, the room is nothing like it was.
Now it’s a plain white hospital-type square, with nothing but a lone modern TV on a stand. He’s in a bed, a tube up his nose, thick straps around his legs and arms.
All that was a vision??
Caleb choked, struggling against the tube.
A vision in a vision. Now he knew how he had been caught, and why no one caught on to Boris’s identity or the threat.
Where was he? Really in Australia, or was that just a visionary head-fake as well? A test? Was Boris even here with him? Could he project visions from anywhere?
Struggling, trying to focus, he willed his power to rise. Willed the answer to a focused question, something that should have been easy, second nature.
What came back was nothing but a staggering wall of resistance.
Impotent.
He couldn’t move, much less scatter his mind to take the measure of his or anyone else’s predicament.
Couldn’t do a thing but watch and listen to the increasingly grim news.
That at least, hadn’t been staged, and the latest story only added to the desolation.
Stargate — and everyone he cared about — was finished.
The headline of: MAJOR US SENATOR IMPLICATED IN PSYCHIC SPYING was followed with the sight of Mason Calderon led out of a helicopter in handcuffs, surrounded by men in with machine guns.
Caleb let out a moan.
Xavier…
3
“The accommodations leave something to be desired,” Xavier Montross declared with every last bit of confidence he could muster.
After the overly dramatic show of parading him around to the media — the big fish caught in the net — he had been dragged down here, to a secret detention center reserved for the worst of the worst. Dingy lighting, stained walls, a smell of desperation and misery.